The Charter School Difference: Not Quite What We Imagined

Images

Twenty-one years after the first charter schools opened in
Minnesota, what do we know about charter school performance in the United
States?

As the charter school movement has grown to comprise 5,600
schools serving 2 million students, the debate that question inspires has
tended to be impassioned but ill-informed, with charters caricatured as either
scourge or panacea.

Until now. In Choices
and Challenges: Charter School Performance in Perspective (Harvard
Education Press, 2013), Priscilla Wohlstetter, Distinguished Research Professor
at TC, and co-authors Joanna Smith (University of Oregon) and Caitlin C. Farrell
(University of California-Berkeley) add welcome nuance to the conversation. Analyzing
more than 400 journal articles and think-tank papers they chose according to
rigorous inclusion criteria, Wohlstetter and her coauthors clarify what is
known with respect to charter school innovation, student performance,
accountability outcomes, competition and more.

On student achievement, which Wohlstetter calls the
“lightning-rod issue,” she says “the-big finding that continues to hold up in
state after state” is that “charter schools are over-represented at both the
higher and lower ends of student achievement.”
Which raises the policy question: “Why are we not replicating schools at
the high end, and why are authorizers not closing down schools at the low end?”

On the question of how charter schools use their autonomy,
the answer seems to be: not much and not terribly well.

The evidence suggests that charter schools do
not always use the autonomy they’ve been granted in ways that improve test
scores. In fact, the research shows that charters overall are doing very little
to tap the potential of innovative strategies such as hybrid classroom/online
teaching, which can be effective with at-risk students and other populations. “I’d
like charter schools to be bolder and push the envelope beyond a classroom of
one teacher and 30 students,” Wohlstetter says.

Their failure to do so may be related to another finding: As the charter movement scales up, through
both for-profit and non-profit school networks --and in some states charter
districts, school-level autonomy may wane. Charters are increasingly run by Education
Management Organizations (EMOs) and their non-profit counterparts, Charter
Management Organizations (CMOs). CMOs in particular have been “fueled by a huge
infusion of philanthropic money,” Wohlstetter says. They often perform well but remain insufficiently studied; the first
journal article on the topic, by Wohlstetter and her co-authors, appeared only
last year.

In considering the hot-button issue of whether charters are
more racially segregated than other schools, the authors say that the great
diversity of schools and the immense variance in the state and local rules that
govern them make it impossible to generalize.For example, 16 states have rules requiring charters to reflect
the diversity of surrounding communities. In other areas, the charters’
admissions policies favoring siblings can perpetuate racial imbalance.

Charters have demonstrated some success in getting parents
more involved, although the benefits of that involvement are not always apparent
or measurable.

Despite all their flaws and inconsistencies, charter schools
are unlikely to go away any time soon, Wohlstetter says. Having survived an
early period of “let all flowers bloom,” as well as subsequent waves of
expansion, refinement and scrutiny, they are now a fixture of the education
landscape.

“I don’t think something is out there that is going to
replace charters,” Wohlstetter says, “They were created as laboratories for
innovation. The question is whether they can offer us lessons to help him
improve traditional public schools.”